Tuesday, January 29

MIT Lecture Browser (Speechless!)

WHAT?"The Lecture Browser is a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology. You can search for topics, much like a regular web search engine. If any results look relevant, you can play the video starting at the relevant point and see the synchronized transcript. "

LEARNING?"This project explores ways to enable educators and students to more effectively disseminate audio and video recordings of academic lecture material...The results of our research are being showcased in two different ways. In addition to the lecture browser shown here, we are also developing a a web-based spoken lecture processing server that allows users to upload audio files for automatic transcription and indexing. To help the speech recognizer, users can provide their own supplemental text files, such as journal articles, book chapters, etc., which can be used to adapt the language model and vocabulary of the system"

Are you kidding me! This I like! Alright, it needs a face lift and perhaps it should use Flash-based videos (if possible) instead (in the future!). It will be interesting to follow the progress of this much needed innovation. Can you imagine being empowered with such features in YouTube, iTunes, Google Video, etc.? Can't wait! :)